Myrtti ja alppiruusu

About this book

"Myrtti ja alppiruusu" by Joel Lehtonen is a collection of travel sketches written in the early 20th century. The work follows a reflective Finnish traveler through Italy, blending vivid landscapes and city scenes with intimate encounters and historical meditation. Lyrical and sensuous, it lingers on everyday life, art, and ruins, with the first-person observer at its center and memorable figures—like a tender landlady and a reborn seminarian—humanizing the vistas.

The opening moves from an Alpine pass into Italy, where a radiant peasant mother in a crowded train becomes the narrator’s living emblem of the country’s promise. In Rome, he settles by S. Pietro in Vincoli, savoring market mornings, palm-dotted squares, and the homely care of Benedetta, an Albanian landlady whose stories of former boarders and lost loves shape a warm domestic idyll. Walks to Janiculum and glimpses of street musicians deepen the city’s atmosphere. A rain-soaked evening on Capitol Hill turns into a trance-like vision of the Forum: temples and emperors rise and fall in his mind as the lullaby refrain “Ninna, ninna e nanna” merges ruin with memory and the Christian takeover. Finally, he visits a Jesuit seminary to meet a converted acquaintance—now renamed and tightly disciplined—observing cloistered routines, brittle zeal, and the cost of ascent from poverty. The section closes by sketching that friend’s lonely, striving youth, hinting at the social fractures beneath the book’s travel scenes.